The Harsh Reality of `Hoop Dreams'

The dream of inner-city black kids to make it in the NBA has become such a familiar motif in movies that it's almost a cliche. But "Hoop Dreams" is a documentary that breathes new life into the subject by showing the everyday reality of that dream.

"Hoop Dreams," now available on home video, is a massive work that traces five years in the lives of two young men, William Gates and Arthur Agee, possible NBA prospects, who start off as 14-year-olds playing basketball in a school yard.

Though the movie clocks in at just under three hours, it is -- aside from an occasional slow spot -- fascinating and exciting.

The highlights of real-life basketball games here are as suspenseful and gripping as any games on live television. Arthur and William are people the audience comes to care about, so it matters whether William makes

the game-winning point from the free-throw line or Arthur's team wins the city championship.

Both boys, who come from poor families, see basketball as their one small chance to make it out of the ghetto. In fact, they might have other tickets available to them, such as an education, but basketball is the one they recognize and the one their parents and friends are most invested in.

"Everybody is my coach," William says. "They ask me, 'Will you remember me when you're in the NBA?' I should ask them, 'Will you remember me if I'm not in the NBA?' "

"Hoop Dreams" explores the culture of basketball in the black community. It details how budding talent is recognized, rewarded and sometimes exploited by the basketball machinery.

Though both are good kids, Arthur and William are very different. William is gentle, diffident and eager to please, while Arthur is more of a slacker and a wise guy. Throughout you tend to worry more about Arthur, who seems more likely to get into trouble. Yet Arthur has a kind of oblivious resilience that William lacks.

In "Hoop Dreams" the mechanism of the athlete emerges as something as finely tuned and fragile as that of the artist. William is good because he's confident and innovative; and he's confident and innovative because he's good.

But when his confidence is interrupted, he becomes for a time like a centipede trying to remember which leg to move first.